Get Satisfaction is updating its customer community system with new widgets that centralize customer comments on client websites rather than on getsatisfaction.com.

"This new widget architecture empowers companies and business users in the company to embed community anywhere they want to online, on any page of a site, any product listing, or marketing campaign or product review," Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction said in an interview. The company is one of the leading providers of software to power online communities where customers can ask questions, register complaints, make suggestions, and provide other feedback. Its software is delivered from the cloud, as software-as-a-service.

Get Satisfaction previously provided widgets that would display a form for entering a question or complaint, but interacting with that widget on a business website would take the user to an area on getsatisfaction.com devoted to feedback on the products and services offered by that business. Now, users will be able to post a question, suggestion, or complaint without leaving the website they started on.

That's good for websites that want to maintain their engagement with the user, but it's also good for the user, Lea said. "We've all become very sensitive to being pulled in and out of experiences."

A widget displayed on a product page also can be configured to expose some of the community conversation about that product. That's often the best way to sell, Lea said. "The customer voice is so much more credible than marketing copy," she said.

On the other hand, merchants who are concerned about displaying too much of the wrong feedback can configure the widgets to display only that feedback categorized as praise as opposed to complaints and questions. Get Satisfaction is still committed to "transparency," and the full conversation will still be available on getsatisfaction.com, but it also wants to give its clients control over how they use the tool, Lea said.

The embedding feature, called Get Satisfaction Engage, has a wizard-driven user interface that requires no technical expertise. This lets marketers, merchandizers, and other business users configure their own communities, Lea said. The tool generates a snippet of HTML and JavaScript for the Web development team to embed in the relevant pages. However, once that snippet is in place, it's not necessary to modify it when configuration and layout options are changed--all that is controlled from the administration tool, she said.

Get Satisfaction Engage is available in limited release now, with a dozen clients already actively using it, and will be generally available by the end of May, Lea said.

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This is the approach we've always had at CustomerSure too and we find it's popular to provide that combination of control and independence.

However unless comments are followed up effectively there are no customer benefits and no business benefits, which is why we've always focused just as much on what happens after feedback has been submitted. Feedback systems need to have features that close the loop back to the customer (when the comment requires it).

Get Satisfaction have always positioned themselves as a community support tool, no doubt with considerable success. It will be interesting to see whether their positioning shifts on the matter of company-to-customer support, which seems to me what customers crave the most.

Kampyle and Webreep have had this feature for years. But I am keen to see how get sat have implemented it. Having to register to give feedback, or leave the site has always bothered me when using get sat. So its great news they're catching up and changing it. Good job!

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